PKNY Friday we had a big BBQ and plenty of jamming in my backyard.
People came from as far as Michigan, Colorado and Atlanta. Several
visitors put a lot of hard work into building a precision garden,
something I’ve thought about since I first heard of plum pole
training. Between plenty of food, great weather, and a customizable
setup people were jamming well in to the night, with some people even
going out for a circuit at 4am.
At 6 the following morning Zac, Bryan, and I woke up to start
breakfast, though admittedly I didn’t play a very crucial part. By 7
we had pancakes flying off the griddle and a short blast of my stereo
had the whole crew up and at em. We were able to get out early and
head over to Central Park where we would be starting the days jam. We
met up at Heckscher with everyone just coming for the day, played
around on the fence there for a while, then started a huge game of
Zombie Tag, to great success. Once nearly everyone had arrived we got
up on to the rock for a group picture and split up into groups.

My group headed out for some training in the ramble, but not before a
good warm-up on the way. A short jog brought us to the gravel along
the path to Bethesda Terraces where we started a session of Indian QM.
We began by demonstrating several different methods of QM that we
train, and then explained the concept of Indian Running. Everyone QMed
along the gravel in a designated fashion while the person in the back
of the line would make their way to the front, at which point they
would decide a new designated fashion to continue along with. We kept
it moving and finished off the last 50 feet of gravel or so with
inchworms, Bryan pushing through them with just one arm.

From there we went down into the terrace and I introduced a shortened
version of a circuit that we do there frequently. Once everyone got a
little comfortable with jumping between the pillars and traversing
along the walls we set the rules for the circuit. You could do an
inchworm between the pillars instead of trying the jump, if you tried
the jump but failed you would have to do an inchworm and 10 pushups or
20 squats. If you fell off at any time during the circuit you would
have to do 10 pushups or 20 squats. We started by QMing down one set
and traversing around the wall, where many people continued to fall
off throughout the Bethesda session, resulting in hundreds of pushups.
Others were able to climb along the wet sandstone and jump along the
pillars, QMing up the stairs on the other side and coming back around
for another pass. Once everyone felt thoroughly warmed up we headed
over to the ramble.

We started by just wandering a bit, rambling if you will, it seemed
like a normal session in the Ramble might be a no go with mud and wet
rocks and trees, not to mention that several in our group that made it
this far had not had previous experience with training parkour. We got
to the waterfall we often train at and after a short bit of messing
around, Sky began carrying logs down the hill. From that we all began
carrying two large logs up and down the hill, passing off at the end.
Between various methods of carrying and the differences between
traveling up and down hill, along with the added difficulty of
navigating through mud and rocks made for a pretty intense session,
not to mention the hilarity of seeing Rob and I slipping in synchrony
time after time. We finished the session up with a swift pace
traversing through the ramble to Belvedere Castle, where we worked
flow a bit in the heavy rain before heading over to the subway to meet
up with the rest of the group.

We ended up at the banks after a short stop for a meal at about 3:45,
where everyone met up and dispersed along the rails to train their own
thing. Chris Price and I had a nice session of untrained and
underappreciated movements, with some races to prove at least decent
effectiveness. Nikkie started a nice session with several traceurs
holding a bar for others to vault. From there we all headed back to my
place for another BBQ, where people ate and hung out into the night,
outside despite poor weather, and inside playing cards. An early
morning diner run replaced last years light conditioning session,
which is unfortunate, but we can always make next years twice as
light.

On Sunday we started off by heading to an amazing castle playground
near me around noon. Just as we were setting off someone mentioned
Chinatown Park, and I said in passing that if this park got torn down
I would probably cry. We were woefully greeted at the park by a pile
of rubble, and after messing around for a bit at a stream nearby we
grabbed some of the old playground and headed off to another park
nearby.
We headed to a park near me that has some amazing trees to climb and
play around in, but were unfortunate enough to get there the same day
as a massive crafts fair. From what I understand the group that went
to play in the trees was not able to do so for very long. My group had
gone over to the track and put together a pretty good little workout
that we didn’t get the chance to add upon. Along one side of the
track, about 100m or so there are thick green rails, about 7 feet high
or so to the side with the track and a little over three to the side
with the stands. There are a couple gaps about five feet wide along
the rail for stairs that run up the stands. We decided to run a mile
and balance the rail each time we passed it. Going from the elevated
heart rate from running to trying to calm and focus for balance proved
a good challenge. Once we weren’t able to stay in the park any longer
we headed over to a school with some nice rails and a decent
playground to play around on. After a couple hours we headed back to
my home for a bit of a smaller BBQ as people headed back to their
respective homes. We made a bon fire, had reeses s’mores and enjoyed
the feeling you can only get after a great jam.

Beast Coast

Most of the NY crowd was able to get to Beast Coast on time after an all night session of PDQ and a nap on the Chinatown bus. As we got to Primal there was a small group already training, people mingled and hopped in to the little vault session as more people from all over poured into the gym.

Skipper arrived with all of the food a little later and got to grilling. Mark told us it would be about half an hour before it was ready and rhetorically asked if people wanted to get ‘Primal’. He led a great warm up with a range of dynamic movements and static holds and afterwards told us all to line up for three rounds of wall climbs on the 8 foot box. He timed us and kept the people in line waiting to go busy with more exercises. By then we had around 40 people and we made the first round in a miserable 3:33. Mark told us that for the second round, every second we got more than 3:00 we would have to do 2 burpees. We heeded the warning and with a little strategy managed to pull off the second round in an excellent 2:06. Of course this meant that for the last round, we were told, that any second over 1:50 we would have to do 3 burpees. After some serious pumping it we managed to get 1:45, less than half the time of the first round!

More people started coming in, the food was devoured and a good jam session was started at Primal. With a couple interesting setups and lots of people challenging themselves, the boxes at Primal saw some good use. Afterwards we headed out with a full crew to a park nearby on New Jersey Avenue. There was a group somewhere in the park working on just about every element of training. At one point we even got a 55 person game of PDQ together.

From there a few groups jogged over to Meridian Hill Park and got an early start on training there. The hot weather lent to being lazy but there were plenty of people working on wolf crescents and big precisions. There was a slackline set up for a while and a hack circle, it was a great place to climb and jump around as well as to just chill out. Everyone headed their separate ways for dinner and met back up at Primal where people got back to the modifiable training ground.

After a short session in the gym everyone headed upstairs for Skipper’s film festival. It featured over a dozen great parkour videos from all over the country that were presented to us for the first time. It was excellent to see people pushing parkour both in terms of movement and in terms of capturing it’s essence through video. There were videos submitted from people with a range of skill levels and videos that have taken 16 years to shoot to one that was shot the day of the event. Overall the festival was well received and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing it again at next year’s Beast.

Once the film festival ended everyone either got in line to shower or headed down stairs to keep training. There was a great tricking session, a few people drilling the basics, and some troopers ending the day off with a crossfit workout. Training went on into the night but eventually everyone decided the smartest thing to do was to find some place to lie down and get some sleep for the next day.

When I got up the next day we were being pushed out of the gym so we could get an early start. After a trip to Safeway we headed to the Metro so that we could get to Gateway Park in Rosslyn.
Interesting architecture and a large amount of open space lent to it being a great place to start off the day. Travis and Mark led a warm-up with everyone that I only got to see the tail end of, followed by a conditioning session led by Mark. By the time that was ending there were people spread out throughout the park pushing themselves towards different goals. After missing the warm-up and conditioning I knew I needed to get some quality training in, so a small group was pulled together and we all did QM drills through the grass. Between the hot sun above us and the cool grass below, it was the perfect way to spend a morning.

After jamming around Gateway for a while everyone headed across the bridge and got some lunch. People began meeting up at the Exorcist stairs and I revisited my old challenge of QMing to the top without taking a break. When I finished Zac started and by the time he was pushing up his final stairs more people had taken it on. For some background to this, two years ago I told Mark this was my goal, before having seen the stairs of course, and he quickly said it was impossible (10 pushups). That day I got up just past the second landing and took a break, proving him, at least temporarily, right. I trained a bit and came back the next month to complete it. From then to now I can’t say how proud I am of the parkour community, the number of people that completed this past Sunday what Mark had once told me was impossible was nothing short of astounding.

Once we finished some more conditioning on and around the stairs we all headed up to George Washington University. There were plenty of rails, walls, and jersey barriers to keep everyone occupied and the group quickly spread out around campus. I didn’t make it past the parking lot, but there were several groups wandering the grounds and a large one trained at the chapel. Once training finished we said our goodbyes to some and headed back to Primal to say the same to others.

I headed back to Zac’s house where we got a big post-Beast BBQ together. 14 of us chowed down on steak, chicken and burgers, along with a range of veggies and for dessert some excellent s’mores. The s’mores were a little unconventional in that they were made with Reeses topped by the marshmallow, no graham cracker necessary. With some creative and adventurous thinking we also managed to accent them nicely. With a great weekend of training and full with good food everyone headed downstairs and passed out.

We woke up to a bright and sunny day and decided the best way to spend it would be out on the water. We piled people into a canoe, swam around, and had an excellent time. We even set up a slack line between two pilings over the water. Slack water muscle ups and slippery feet led to a lot of laughs. The Severn River was warm, the sun was hot, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

The winds changed a bit and the sky grew grayer as we packed up everything and put it away. We headed back up to the house to hang out and cook over the grill again. After plenty of burgers and dogs and chicken we all headed downstairs to finish off the night. We started a game of Pushup Poker, with everyone in it and playing to win. The dealer chooses the exercise, everyone in ante’s a certain number with relative difficulty, and deals out the chosen game of poker. Rounds of betting involve adding more of an exercise to the pot and people have the opportunity to fold out and do exercises equivalent to the pot. Lots of creativity and terrible poker playing led to some serious working out. Chris Salvato lost the first big hand having to do 90 Squats. The biggest loss was by me and Adam Kroll who found ourselves owing 26:00 of plank. After spreading out 20:00 of it throughout the hours of the game, we decided to finish strong. We ended it with 6:00 straight and decided that we should just go straight through and do another 6:00.

The group thinned out to 6 of us and we decided that if you wanted to leave the game you had to admit you were a bitch. In the same respect, the game stopped being poker when we decided you had to say the same thing when you folded out. I rode more bad hands all the way to the end than I can count. After 7 hours of so many different kinds of pushups, squats and squat holds, handstand holds and shoulder taps, pistols and pistol jump burpees, more exercises than I can remember, and of course, way too much plank, the group thinned down to 3. Bryan Augestine, Adam Kroll and I headed out in to the rain around 5am to finish it all off. We QMed down to the water from Zac’s house. With steep wet stairs and holly leaves to get stuck in our hands and feet the trip was a rough one. Once we got there we had a workout on his pier, complete with several rounds and kinds of QM, plenty of lunges and enough different drills to leave us thoroughly trashed. We jumped into the water to finish it all off with 15:00 of treading water. The minutes inched on and when we finally reached 15 we decided to keep pushing. At 15 we did a minute of just legs followed by reaching 16 and switching to a minute of just arms. The worst part of this came in the middle of it, at 16:30, when I asked Adam the time his watch said, I registered it, and continued to struggle to push myself up with my hands, my head sinking lower than it had before, I remember looking up at the sky, counting out my strokes, the whole world slowed down, and when I asked Adam for the time again it was 16:37. Once reaching 17:00 the last three minutes to 20 failed in comparison, and we emerged with a muscle up on Zac’s dock victorious. At 6am, after 8 hours of tough training, standing in the rain at the end of the pier, we were champions.

Beast Coast was an overwhelming success. More than 120 people from around the country showed up to train. The technical skill and conditioning level being pushed forward was impressive. The camaraderie between traceurs bettering themselves and helping to better each other was amazing. It was so great to see so many people coming out and moving, pushing themselves in so many different ways.

Flow Jam

Hey just wanted to talk a bit about a great training session we put together in NY. A little over ten people came out to train, a few of them doing parkour for the first time but had trained extensively in other disciplines. and a couple completely new people. We started it all off with a proper warm up and it was great to see some of these new guys trudging on right behind me on all of this QM they hadn't tried before. Everyone managed to push out every step and everyone ended it off feeling satisfied.
From there we broke the big group down into 3 smaller ones led by Nikkie, Irish, and myself. Nikkie led an extensive railwork section teaching people how to flow and weave through rails. One of the guys there would have no problem doing muscle up after muscle up, but when it came to those underbars he was working up a sweat. Irish led a section on vaulting, teaching people to keep tempo and to transition well between vaults. He put everyone through some time trials on some circuits he made up. I led a section on plyometric work, teaching people to better bound and rebound through their environment and of course stressing to always use proper landing technique and never train plyometrics too frequently. To finish it all off we broke down in to two groups and each set up their own circuits incorporating what they had learned.
It was a really positive experience, it's great to have new people coming and training hard and striving for self improvement.

The parkour community is really fantastic. I've been so many places now because of it and there's always been an open couch for me. It's great to head out there to some place you've never been, train with lots of new people and hit all the cool spots. Of course this goes both ways and anyone coming in to NY knows that there's a place to stay at my house. When Martin Heinrich of Parkour Stuttgart contacted me a couple months ago through TK17, I was happy to see how enthusiastic he was, after a few exchanges of messages I was definitely looking forward to his stay here.
He came to NY first for a couple weeks for Model United Nations, he was able to come out a couple times to train but I wasn't able to make it to any of the same sessions. When his stay there ended I picked him up in Times Square and headed down to the Brooklyn Banks for some light training, it wasn't too intensive, it was a drizzly day and we both wanted to get back to my house kind of early. I was a little disappointed that work had come up during his few days here, but figured we'd make the most of it.
After our first day of work X and I had loaded up a truck with 20,000 pounds. We g

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ot home around 8 and Martin who had been eagerly wandering around my neighborhood was excited to go out and train. We grabbed our longboards and headed a few miles out to a nice park near me with some excellent trees to play around on. After a bit of that some discussion of PK Gen led me to try and emulate one of their warmups. This quickly became Martin leading us through some pretty fantastic conditioning. After some railwork and a supermarket run we ended up getting back home around 2, eagerly awaiting waking up at 5 to unload the truck into a house.
On Saturday we held a beginners jam in Central Park. We had around 25 people show and there were a lot of new faces. We did some light jogging followed by a warmup led by Martin which knocked a couple out but the troopers went on to a rotation of three stations, precisions/landings led by Pyro and myself, balance led by Nikkie, and cats/climbups led by martin. Afterwards we headed to Bethesda but as it was crowded decided to finish it up with a bit of a workout there. After a fun pushup circle with all sorts of new torture methods implemented the beginners jam was declared a success.
From there we headed into the ramble for some natural parkour and general monkeying around. Pyro and I got a few jumps we've been eyeing and Martin tried some things we hadn't looked at before. After an good game of follow the leader and some limbless climbing everyone had headed out so we headed down to the East Village to grab a delicious burger at Paul's Place. Nikkie and Bestchester headed out after dinner and Martin and I headed over to the Hudson to walk down to World Trade. We balanced down along the riverside, a good way to calm down and relax and clear your mind, cool wind and the Jersey Skyline accross the water.
On his last day we headed in to the city with a forecast of showers through the day. Drizzle when we got there and confusion between the guys we were meeting up with led to full on rain before we could train. Our pals were out of commision so Martin led me through another kickass conditioning session. After somewhere around a mile of QM we headed to grab some food and were off to the airport, which he got to with -2 minutes to spare.
It was definitely an excellent experience and I can't wait to be able to get over to Germany to train with him again. It's always great to train with someone you haven't before. Whether your spots or theirs they always have new ways to move, to train, things you wouldn't see for yourself or think to do. I encourage you to open your house up next time someone says they are coming in to your town, and I hope you start watching videos like a kid in a candy shop just trying to decide where to go next. And of course, if you come to NY, you've got a place to stay.

Keep Chill
Train Hard
HCT

Thursday Training at CF.

CF WOD

"Josh"
I replace the 24" box jump with jumping onto the "tank" 40"

40 wall slam 20#
10 box jump
30 ball slam
15 box jump
20 ball slam
20 box jump
10 ball slam
25 box jump
1000mt row.

17:02

The box jump was intense.

PK class.

Free flow warm-up, did a bunch of vaults and techniques using the Tank and soft trapezoids

Double kong, kong precision, kong to cat, kong handstand and others.

Tic-Tac training
worked on tic-tacs, everyone got it really quickly.

Did a bunch of tic-tac experimentation
Tic-tac to reverse
Tic-tac to kong
Tic-tac to dash
Tic-tac to speed
Tic-tac to wall spin

During the free session I did a kong to precision and got it but the trapezoid I was precisioning onto moved and I felt back. Landing on my lower back on the big plate area above the collar bone. Same area I landed at during the BBQ. It is not something that has happened often but really didnt feel good. It is stiff and hinders my movement I nutch. It was a silly fall, but even the silliest of falls cant cause real damage. Fortunately it was nothing to bad but it did stop me for a few mins and bugged me while we were stretching.

Hopefully it will be ok for tomorrow.